+++
title = "Reflective Questionnaire"
date = 2021-02-04
+++

Reflections
===========

> Can you tell us about any professional development you participated in
> last year and why it helped?

At work I found myself providing the training and professional
development more than I had done for myself. For example, many of my
coworkers do not have experience in the same programming languages let
alone an academic background in programming that I do, so I spent quite
a bit of time either in groups or one-on-one reviewing code and
explaining best practices and my own personal preferences and why I
follow them. My top consultations are probably python and csharp.
Related to this, I also started regular meetings with my immediate peer
developers last summer to discuss best practices and agree on
programming style by consensus.

On my own time, I had attempted to expand my achievements. Around this
time last year I started the process of returning to PhD studies this
last year and I applied for some grants. I continued this until about
April when I realized I did not have the bandwidth to pursue it while
also dealing with the side effects of the pandemic. However, I had been
able to use that knowledge to help others through the same process of
applications and grant writing.

Another activity on my own that I kept up for the entire calendar year
or 2020, I pitched three and kicked off two capstone projects for the CS
students. Only one of the projects ended up with a viable product, but
all of them related to domain knowledge that I have applied to my day
job. I learned how to use poetry (a python package) and docker compose
(an orchestration tool similar to k8s), both of which I have used in
recent projects. I use poetry in everything now and now I have an
alternative orchestration tool. Another of the capstones interviewed the
advising staff and I used details from that to fix some minor issues in
my web apps.

     

> What do you like to work on the most?

For all the tech stacks I currently have on my plate, I enjoy working
with python the most. It\'s a well designed language with an excellent
ecosystem. Thanks to type annotations and the wonderful free software
packages black, mypy, and tox, I can write code that will hold up in
almost any programming language, should we decide to migrate, regardless
of the paradigm.

> What about your job do you find difficult?

Like finding a weak muscle that needs exercise, I spend quite a bit of
my time planning what to do in addition to just doing those tasks. I
think this overhead has lessened over the last year, though I still have
a large enough tech stack to manage, with no single goto to discuss all
of it.

> Can you discuss your top three achievements from the last year?

We had an automation tool that acts as a transceiver between our school
and the federal government. We had called it TDClient, a proprietary
file transfer tool, though I renamed it to saig\_portal because most of
the work is unrelated to that tool and I figured I would future proof
the name in case they ever decide to use sftp or rsync. The original was
python2 and apparently was never able to successfully upload files. When
I finished, I had migrated it to python3 and we could upload files.

Related to another python2 to python3 migration for our custom APIs for
our ERP, I have been able to make improvements to the orchestration by
using docker compose. The original system, which is currently in
production, uses a series of custom scripts to configure and deploy each
container. My new version uses docker compose for each container, with a
single configure script (which if you\'ve ever used autotools, which it
doesn\'t but it mimics, so developers will be more familiar than our
custom scripts), and for the main web apps, I simplified the uwsgi so
all file mutations happen in var. Though we have not completed the
language migration (which is a moving target because we have seven new
apps in development right now), what I learned from the orchestration is
something I\'ll be able to reuse in almost any tech stack that uses
containers.

As I mentioned earlier, I feel like I have been able to make a positive
impact on several developers, whether on my team or on my (virtual)
floor.

> Do you have any hopes with regard to tasks or professional development
> for the next year?

I would really like to help my team finish migrating all of our python2
code.

For future development, if all goes well with the world, I plan on
applying for my PhD in computer science and continuing to volunteer as a
capstone sponsor.
